This is my first try with the Ys series, was really surprised at how much I enjoyed the bump system . I decided to try playing in nightmare which offered a challenge, but was quite manageble until that damn bat boss (I very much regret my choice in difficulty now).

I've already spent several solid hours trying to beat this boss, reading guides and watching videos to no avail. I think another hinderance to my progress is the fear that I will come across another boss that is similar or even more difficult to pass. If this happens, I think it is likely I will lose all interest in continuing on with the series.

It's a shame because I really enjoyed the higher paced, simpler gameplay of this JRPG (I generally prefer more complex mechanics, but the bump system is pretty new and fresh to me). I never felt like I was grinding for gear and levels and money which is a nice change.

I am maximum level with all silver gear. The rings as I discovered don't do anything, which is a shame.

When the battle starts I try to keep close to the bats as I've learned that they all fly in a line directly towards Adol, then I pretty much trace around the outside trying to keep the bats as clustered as possible, trying to create a bit more distance so that they will take on the solid form.

Attacking is made more difficult because of the very tiny window that you have to do damage when in that solid form (vaugllion is the name from what I've seen online). It also seems that I can miss if I attack too early as well (this causes some strange attacks where I will somehow land an attack part way through him and end up on the other side).

My best result so far is having the boss a little below 1/2 health before I am killed. Recently I've been modifying my speed and tracing a rupee run pattern rather than going corner to corner, which seems to have improved my odds a bit, but it is still very rare that I can get him down to half health.

Any other tricks that you Ys I veterans use to pass this boss? will there be bosses in the future that have this same level of frustration?

Thanks!

Many thanks for the good news about future bosses! It's very encouraging to know that it does gets better.

I've slowly made gains, with my best result getting the bat boss a little under 1/4 health. I found changing direction seems to have helped a little as well. But I think the time I've spent on the boss has already exceeded my entire game time up until this boss.

EDIT: he's finally dead, I really wonder why they made this boss so incredibly difficult. How many people stopped at this point and swore off the series permanently? I very nearly did.

Oh well, I'm very much relieved. In the end though there wasn't a particular strategy that worked, it really just felt more luck based than anything else.

Sorry to double post, but I think I should probably keep my frustration to the post that I've started as it is related.

I have the Battle Armour, Battle shield and Flame sword, so the best gear I believe.

Boss 6 is in my opinion now more frustrating than that bat boss. I'm quickly approaching the point at which I've spent just as much time on these 2 guys as the bat boss, but I can't make any progress once they only have 3 orbiting crystals/fire balls around them.

It is so difficult for me to even get them to that state (maybe 1 in every 10 replays), and then since the timing is screwed I can't get any further. At least with that bat boss I kept making progress on the HP bar over time (a long time albeit), with these guys, I get them to 1/2 health and haven't progressed for hours now.

I'm rather angry now. With a game with such huge variation in difficulty, why isn't there the ability to reduce the difficulty mid-game? It is a remake that came out in 2009, so surely something like this would of been considered during play testing?

The consistency of nightmare difficulty is all over the place. If I consider the current 6th boss as the baseline difficulty in Nightmare, their difficulty to me looks like the following:

Bosses:
Jenocres - Normal
Nygtilger - Easy/Normal
Vagullion - Nightmare
Pictimos - Normal
Khonsclard - Easy (Took damage, but boss takes damage quicker)
Yogleks & Omulgun - Nightmare

Standard enemies are all about Normal (Hard at the start, but quickly dropping to normal after a few levels and better gear).

The exception being the Twarth's in Darm tower which are considerably tougher than any other enemy I've encounted. They are about normal difficulty with the time ring providing you take them on one at a time, but quickly become hard if there are more than one of them.

I was really starting to forget my woes from Vagullion and enjoy the game once again (Darm tower up until now has been a good amount of fun), but having another road block as bad (well worse, but that is probably because I was hoping not to have to deal with any more bosses as difficult and my disappointment is compounding the frustration I have).

I wonder if it is my age that is making this battle so difficult. Perhaps for younger people it is a cinch, but I can barely keep track of the spinning crystals, and my movement is so damn imprecise. Once things increase in speed, with 3 crystals my reactions are far too slow.

I did actually create a Nvidia profile for Ys I that reduced the maximum framerate from 60FPS to 24FPS just to see if it would help with the boss battle. It did not :)

Thanks for the warning! That reinforces my decision to not waste any more time trying to defeat the bat boss. I only played on Normal, but that doesn't make the fight any more fun. My character is maxed out in levels and gear but he does much too few damage to the bat boss, so I'd probably have to repeat this boring routine of running away then rushing back to the boss when he transforms 8-10 times or so. I'm already demotivated by having maxed out character levels this early in the game, and contrary to you, I felt there was a lot of unnecessary grinding and backtracking to this point as well; if there are any more annoying bosses like this, I think my time is better spend with other games.

I honestly don't remember the sixth boss giving me any serious trouble for whatever reason. (Some YouTube comments seem to suggest that the hit detection in the battle is rather poor.)

In any case, Ys I was one of Falcom's early games, and as a result, the game was not as well designed as later entries in the series. Even Ys II feels more fair than 1 in many respects, and the level cap is high enough that you won't come close until the end of the game. (The game does require you to eventually reach level 51 (IIRC) out of 55 to kill the final boss, but once you get magic, you probably won't have to stop and level up until the very end (assuming you actually fight enemies instead of just avoiding/using magic to skip them).

Feel free to skip the rest of Ys 1 and go straight to 2.

Ys Origin's boss fights are remixes of bosses from Ys 1 and 2, but better designed. Some can be difficult, but unlike that one bat boss in Ys 1, they at least feel fair. The same can be said for Oath in Felghana (whose bosses are remixes of Ys III's bosses) and Ark of Naphistim; the bosses might take a few tries, but they at least feel fair.

In any case, I recommend playing on Easy or Normal for your first playthrough; Very Easy might actually be *too* easy (though in OiF, speedrunning that difficulty could be fun thanks to being able to quicksave jump). For Origin in particular, I would recommend not playing a character you haven't played before on Nightmare; the third character, in particular, has one part that can be quite obnoxious on that difficulty.

I defeated the 6th boss with 3 health remaining. I had a very quiet but intense celebration of the moment, but it was short lived as I now have Dark Fact to deal with, and once again I have been stuck on him for hours.

I've learned that it is best to attack him at the edges & sides since the platforms disappear where Dark Fact is hit. I can regularlly get Dark Fact down to 1/4 health and even managed to get him down to about 2 pixels (1 hit away) in one case; but I see it as a battle of attrition, I have accepted that I will take damage constantly so I look for patterns to maximize the damage done to him over a shorter period of time while trying to keep as much of the platform up as available.

I am surprised though that during the remake no one thought to include the ability to drop the difficulty mid game. It is based on a game from 1987, but it has had multiple remakes from what I can see (Eternal in 1997, Complete in 2001 & Chronicles in 2009).

I definitely have been punished enough for choosing nightmare and wont ever choose anything higher than normal difficulty for any of the Ys games in future, though the difficulty felt great outside of those 3 bosses.

Thanks dtgreene for the insight regarding the other games. I bought the Ys Napishtim, Oath and Origin during the sale as well, so that information regarding those games is all helpful.

I should really skip to Ys II, but I think i'm entrenched in the "sunk cost fallacy" of trying to finish the game. I'm hoping though that I will see reason if I don't see any success after a few more hours of invested time, and be able to move on without completing Ys I...

Hi, I just made a quick video detailing a strategy for Nightmare Dark Fact that may help you. I haven't played the game in a while so it's not the best example, but you can view the video on YouTube. The basic idea is to use the right side of the platform exclusively for attacking in long stretches. From the very moment the fight starts, you should run to the bottom right corner and trace Fact's movement diagonally to the top right corner. Fact will return to this corner several times with his position offset to the left by about 1 tile. Utilizing this you can get about two more long stretches of attacks on him and reliably take down about 1/4 of his health with each one. The rest of the time you should be attacking him on the left most edges while continuously moving to minimize bullet damage. As long as you nail down your attacks on the right side though you don't need to worry too much and can mostly leave the left side to luck.

The video is here: youtu.be/ltY8XliUASM

Edit: Some people claim to have a bug where the boss fights play at twice the speed. I think it had something to do with VSync and 120 Hz monitors. You should also make sure that you aren't affected by that.

@Shadowx2468x Thanks for trying to help with your own strategy you used to defeat Dark Fact. Unfortunately after giving Dark Fact several more tries (I couldn't quite get your strategy down, sorry about that!) I've Shelved Ys for now (I've reloaded my 9 month old save of Legends of the Heroes: Trails in the Sky FC which I'm now enjoying again).

I've even resorted to trying to hex edit the difficulty down (save game information starts @ 5E36 offset on BMP files), but I'm no hacker and there appears to be some sort of encryption (data on the save changes each save regardless of whether anything has changed (a save made 2 seconds apart has very different data especially looking at 5E62 ->5E75 & 5E85 onwards)).

I got excited when I noticed changing 5E61 from 20h -> 40h to decrease the displayed difficulty on the save (Nightmare -> Easy), but not the actual game difficulty, :(

I had no issue with the game's difficulty on normal until Dark Fact. It was such a wtf moment. I had an issue where playing the game in borderless fullscreen, regardless whatever framerate I had it set to, various aspects of the fight moved faster and my character moved slower to the right than normal. I had to set the game to 60hz fullscreen for the fight to play normally.

As far as how to fight him, you have to anticipate where he'll be and try to bump him a bunch when he moves by. Lots of youtube videos can show you how to fight him.

Ys II has nothing like this and I found the difficulty pretty balanced on normal.

If you are having trouble with Ys 1's final boss, double-check to make sure that you have Silver equipment equipped.

Note that Silver equipment isn't the best equipment stst-wise, but it *is* what you need to have a chance against the final boss. It is *really* easy to make this mistake.

(Well, technically, you can beat the boss without it, but doing so without the sword requires TAS-level gameplay (there's a difficult trick that allows you to hit twice, might even be frame-perfect or something), and doing so without the armor and shield, while more reasonable, is still going to be much harder than it should be.)

I think I must look like I have a 1000 yard stare when I think of having to fight Dark Fact again.

I'm pretty close to finishing Trails in the sky First Chapter, so I might give it another go then. I'm using all silver equipment as I learned early on that you needed that equipment to defeat him, so unfortunately it is my skill that is the problem.

I've been playing videos of how others have approached the battle (including the one ShadowX2468x linked to above). I can get his health down below 1/3 regularly, and I had a panic moment (which probably ruined it for me), where I was one hit away from victory, but it is such a horrible, horrible battle that I freak out as soon as I think this might be the one battle that I do finish him off...

Thanks for all the help though, even if it is no help to myself, perhaps someone else might find the advice given by others useful (while my lack of success can be a big warning to those thinking about choosing nightmare difficulty!).

I'll edit this post later on once I've given it another try.

EDIT: Done. Dark Fact is finally dead

It wasn't a great nor a bad feeling, I released a lot of anger at my tormentor as his cape flapped about in the wind. I didn't really panic in that last battle, because I wasn't expecting to win...perhaps that was the key to finally finishing him.

I did however get him down to a single hit away from death twice in this sitting before finally defeating him.

I wish I could say that there was some sort of sure strategy to defeating him, but if there is, I certainly can't offer one. I have to say that I was enjoying this game outside the 3 bosses I struggled with...but they really ruined my experience of the game.

Choosing Nightmare difficulty was a big mistake on my part, but I made that choice after trying the game on easy first and finding the non-boss monsters too easy. Switching to Nightmare made it challenging, but not too difficult, and it wasn't until Vagullion (3rd bat boss); with my character at maximum level, that I regretted my choice.

Oh well, I'm glad to put that game behind me. I feel now that I have earned the right to play Ys II now, which I will do on normal difficulty :)

Hey all,

Playing Ys 1 for the first time. Just fought the bat boss and I decided to make an account just to share with you all what I have discovered. I was having a terrible time on normal difficulty, but I realized something and developed a technique based on my observation. I was able to beat him on my second try when using this technique.

Basically, the bats will NOT transform back into the monster if you can see them. I noticed this because sometimes while running around, the bats would swirl as if they were gonna transform, but then go back to chasing me. After this happened way too many times, I realized they were responding to me. If the player doesn't look at the bats, they seem to transform pretty quickly.

So, the strategy I employed: I went to the top right corner and stared at the right wall. The bats started moving towards me in a loose group which gradually got tighter as they got closer. Once they were too close for comfort, I ran downwards without looking at any of the bats. They transformed right in the corner where I was previously standing, and I was close enough to run up and give them a swing. Then immediately ran to the top left corner facing the wall. Rinse and repeat. I think I managed to beat him half health.

Good luck fellow gamers,

– Iron_Heinrich

That's interesting. The method I found was just running in as small a circle as possible around the bats. A lot of people run through the entire arena, which A) makes the bats disperse a lot, thus harder to avoid, and B) may leave you further away from Vaguillion once he materializes. By running in small circles I never had those problems, but your strategy seems even safer. I'll have to try it on my next playthrough.